Gravel popped under the tires of Wren's rental Volvo, and she killed the engine before the sedan had fully stopped. The cottage waited at the end of the lane, white clapboards gone the color of old bone, the porch railing listing a few degrees toward the lake. A birch tree had split halfway up its trunk sometime since she'd last been here, and the upper half lay across the roof like a dropped arm. The shingles beneath it had gone dark with rot.
She sat for a moment with her hands still on the wheel.
Then she grabbed her duffel from the passenger seat and climbed out.
The screen door remembered her. It swung open with the same reluctant screech it had made when she was eleven and Carla used to send her out for the morning paper, and the memory arrived so specifically she could smell the buttered toast and the coffee and hear the clatter of the percolator on the gas stove. Wren's throat closed. She stepped through before she could think about it.
Inside, the cottage held its breath.
Sunlight came in slats through the venetian blinds, painting the hardwood floor in amber bars. Dust had settled on every horizontal surface, a fine gray velvet that caught the light and turned the parlor into something out of a snow globe. The smell hit her next: cedar and old paper and something sweeter underneath, lavender maybe, dried and faded to a memory of itself. The refrigerator in the kitchen alcove ticked its quiet tick. The clock above the mantel had stopped at quarter past four.
Wren set her duffel down by the door and did not move for a long moment.
She had told herself she would not cry in this house. She had told herself a lot of things on the drive up from Boston, most of them useful, none of them true.
"You don't have to do this today," she said aloud, to no one. Her voice sounded small in the high-ceilinged room.
She did it anyway.
The parlor opened into a narrow dining alcove, and beyond that the kitchen, and to the right of the entry a short hall led to two bedrooms and a bath. She walked the hall first because that was the chore. The bathroom was mercifully spare: a claw-foot tub, a pedestal sink, a mirrored medicine cabinet, cotton curtains with a sprigged pattern that had faded to ghosts of themselves. A hand towel still hung from the rack, neatly folded. Carla's work, of course. Even dying, the woman had folded her towels.
The first bedroom had been Carla's. Wren stopped in the doorway.
The bed was made, hospital corners tight enough to pass inspection at any barracks. The patchwork quilt, every square a different scrap of fabric from a different decade of Carla's life, lay smooth across the mattress. A reading lamp with a brass neck stood on the nightstand. A glass of water sat beside it, still half full. A paperback lay facedown on the pillow, cracked open to a page in the middle. Wren did not step in. She did not touch the glass. She stood in the door and looked at the room as if it were a crime scene, which in a way it was.
Carla had died in the bedroom down the hall.
That one had been the guest room until it became the sick room, and Wren did not open the door. Not yet. She could see from where she stood that someone had stripped the bed, removed the equipment, drawn the curtains. A hospital bed was not a hospital bed anymore. It was a metal frame with a cotton coverlet folded at its foot. Someone had done this carefully. Someone had done this with love.
Probably Margot. Probably Lottie.
She turned away and went back to the kitchen.
The percolator sat on the stove, clean and put away in its spot on the second shelf. The dish towels were folded in thirds on the handle of the oven. The little ceramic dish by the sink where Carla had always dropped her rings still held a gold band and a pair of tiny pearl studs. Wren looked at the rings for a long time. Then she reached out and closed her hand around them. The gold was cool against her palm. She did not put them on. She put them in her jacket pocket.
The refrigerator ticked.
She opened it because she was hungry and because she needed something to do with her hands. Inside: a quart of milk three days past its date, a stick of butter, half a lemon in a plastic bag, three eggs in a cardboard carton, a small tupperware of something that had developed a fur. She took out the eggs and the butter and shut the door. The milk she poured down the sink. The tupperware she held at arm's length and carried out to the trash barrel behind the house.
Outside, the lake lay flat and gray under a low sky. The birches along the shore were still bare, their twigs black against the water. A single cormorant sat on a piling at the end of the dock, and when she stepped onto the back porch it lifted and flew off low across the surface, its wings catching the light in dull green. The air smelled of cold water and pine pitch and the faint rot of the split birch.
She set the tupperware down on the porch rail and stood there with her hands in her pockets.
She had not been back in eleven years. The last time had been her grandfather's funeral, and before that some childhood summer she could only half-remember, and before that the long years when Carla had raised her while Margot worked the late shift at the cannery and came home smelling of brine and silence. The cottage had been the steady thing. The cottage had been the place where the percolator clicked on at six and the radio played the same three songs and Carla sat in the wing chair by the window and read her paper novels and pretended not to notice that Wren was pretending to do homework.
Now the wing chair sat empty, and the radio was off, and the percolator had been put away in its spot on the second shelf by someone who had known exactly where it belonged.
Wren went back inside.
She found the matches in the second drawer of the hutch, next to a sheaf of receipts rubber-banded together and a deck of playing cards missing the seven of hearts. The kindling box on the hearth was still half full. She crumpled a sheet of the Laconia newspaper that lay folded on the coffee table, tucked it under the logs, struck a match. The flame took. She sat on the hearth and let the warmth crawl up her shins.
The first thing she had to do, she told herself, was make a list.
She found a notepad in the kitchen drawer, a pencil beside it with the eraser chewed flat, and she sat at the small table and wrote:
Roof. Birch. Refrigerator. Telephone (still on?). Mail. Town hall (death cert, keys). Bea.
She looked at the last word for a moment, then drew a line under it and turned the page.
She made herself eggs. She melted the butter in Carla's small iron skillet and broke the eggs into it and watched them turn white at the edges. She ate standing at the counter, looking out the kitchen window at the lake. The cormorant had come back to its piling. The light was beginning to go.
She washed the skillet. She set it on the stove to dry.
Then she went back to the parlor and stood in front of the bookshelf that ran along the eastern wall, the wall that caught the morning light. The shelves held the expected things: the tall stack of Carla Donnelly's self-published local histories, slim volumes with hand-drawn covers; the row of dictionaries and one thesaurus; the collection of Reader's Digest condensed novels from 1987 onward, shelved in order; a framed photograph in a tarnished silver frame that Wren did not look at directly. Beneath the photograph, a wooden box with a hinged lid.
She knew what was in the box. She had always known.
She lifted the lid.
Letters. Dozens of them, bundled with rubber bands that had gone brittle and snapped at the touch. Postmarks from Portland, from Portsmouth, from a town in Vermont she did not know the name of. All addressed to Mrs. Carla Donnelly, this cottage, RFD 2, Mirror Lake, New Hampshire. Wren lifted one bundle and then another and then another and laid them out on the coffee table like a hand of cards. The rubber bands crumbled. The envelopes sighed open in the dry air, and she could see the handwriting inside, a careful slanted script she did not recognize.
She sat down on the sofa. She picked up the first letter.
Dear Carla,
I know you said not to write again. I am writing anyway. The baby is a boy. We have named him after his grandfather. He has your eyes, or what I remember of your eyes. I am not asking anything. I only wanted you to know.
Wren set the letter down. She picked up another.
Dear Carla,
It has been eleven months. The corn is good this year. Theo says hello. I am well. The baby is well. I do not expect a reply.
She set that one down too.
The fire popped behind her. The clock on the mantel had been still for years. The clock on her phone said 4:47, and the light in the parlor was going amber to gray.
Wren put the letters back in the box. She did not read them. Not tonight. She closed the lid and put the box back on the shelf, beneath the photograph in the tarnished frame, and this time she let herself look at the photograph.
Two women stood on the porch of the cottage. Behind them the lake was a sheet of silver. One woman was tall and dark-haired, her hand resting on the shoulder of the other, who was shorter and fairer and holding, in the crook of her arm, a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket. The dark-haired woman was not smiling. The fair-haired woman was smiling so wide her eyes were almost closed. The baby's face was turned away from the camera.
Wren did not know who the dark-haired woman was. She knew who the fair-haired woman was. She knew who the baby was.
She turned the photograph face down on the shelf and went to find the sheets.
Morning came the way mornings do in Hawthorne: slowly, then all at once. Wren woke to the smell of salt through the cracked bedroom window and the absence of any sound from the kitchen. She lay still for a moment, counting the small things that were different. The mattress here was softer than hers in Portland, the pillow flatter, the ceiling cracked in a pattern she remembered from childhood like the map of some imaginary river system. Sunlight found the gap between the curtain panels and laid itself in a bright strip across the quilt her grandmother had pieced together from old shirts and feed sacks.
She dressed. She did not go back to the parlor.
The walk from the cottage to the center of Hawthorne took twelve minutes if she cut through the cemetery and past the old cannery, fourteen if she took the road. She took the road. The grass in the cemetery was wet, and she had not brought the right shoes, and the morning was one of those mornings where any choice felt like it might be remembered wrong.
Hawthorne in October was a town held together by habit and the color of its paint. Most of the storefronts along the harbor road had been white once. Now they were the soft, weathered gray of old bone, with trim that still tried to be yellow. The diner occupied the corner where the post office used to be its own building, before Bea had bought the lot next door and knocked out the wall, and put in the lunch counter and the PO boxes and a single self-serve copier that worked most days if you did not ask too much of it.
The bell above the door still rang the same way it had when Wren was nine. She had not expected that to be the thing that hit her, but it did.
Inside, the diner smelled the way a diner should: bacon and coffee and the faint sweet undertone of the apple pie Bea set out on Tuesdays and Fridays. The vinyl booths were red. The counter was chrome. There was a pie case by the window that had survived three elections and one hurricane. A radio behind the register was playing something old and country. Bea Tate was behind the counter, pouring coffee for the two men at the end of the bar who had been drinking coffee at the end of that bar for as long as Wren could recall.
Bea saw her before Wren reached the counter.
"Well, I'll be damned," Bea said. She set the pot down with a small decisive clang. "If that isn't the girl who used to steal the maraschino cherries off my sundaes when her mother wasn't looking."
"It was always you looking, Bea."
"That's why you had to be quick." Bea was already coming around the counter, wiping her hands on a dish towel, the same quick bright smile she had worn at twelve and twenty-two and forty-three. She was heavier than Wren remembered, and her hair was shorter, and there were lines around her mouth that the smile had not made deeper so much as it had carved in its own pattern. She smelled like coffee and fryer grease and something floral she had always worn, since high school, the same bottle of it or one she hunted down to replace. "Sit. Sit. You look like you've been up all night and you've been thinking too hard about something, neither of which is good for a person. Booth four's free. I'll bring you the usual and you can tell me you don't want the usual and I'll bring you the usual."
"I don't want the usual."
"Coffee it is, then, and a slice of pie I didn't ask you about." Bea pointed at the booth with the towel. "Sit."
Wren sat. The vinyl sighed under her, the way vinyl in a Hawthorne diner had sighed since before she was born. She took off her jacket and laid it beside her and put her hands flat on the table to feel how cold it was. The window beside the booth looked out onto the harbor road. A pickup truck went by slow. A woman walked a dog. The morning was not yet a morning.
Bea came back with coffee in a heavy white mug that had a chip on the rim and a slice of apple pie on a plate that did not match anything else on the table. She set both down, slid into the booth across from Wren, and folded her hands.
"All right," Bea said. "Tell me."
"Tell you what."
"Whatever it is that brought you back. The funeral, the will, the thing you're not going to tell me about." Bea's eyes were quick and kind and did not blink. "I read the obituary in the paper. I cried, Wren. I cried like a fool. Your grandmother was a good woman and a hard woman and she made the best lemon bars in three counties, and she deserved better than a Tuesday in October. So I cried. And then I put my coffee down and I thought, that girl is back for a reason, and that reason is not just a box of recipes."
Wren picked up the mug. The coffee was strong. The chip on the rim was exactly where she remembered it. "I'm not here for a story, Bea."
"I know you're not. That's why I'm offering you one." Bea leaned forward, the dish towel twisted between her fingers the way it always was when she was thinking fast. "I've been running this paper for eleven years. You know that. What you may not know is that I am, as of this fall, officially three weeks behind on my serialized content, because my last columnist eloped with a man from Bangor and took her half of the subscriber list and her recipes for rhubarb cake, which I did not know were also the recipes for everything else. So I have a paper. I have subscribers. I have a town that is dying on its feet and would like to be reminded it is still breathing. And I have you, sitting in my diner, with your notepad face, which you have had since you were six."
"I'm here for the funeral."
"You are. And you're here for whatever is in that box of recipes your grandmother left you. And you're here because your mother called me last Tuesday and asked me, very carefully, not to put your photograph in the paper, and I told her I had not intended to, because I am not a cruel woman, and she thanked me three times, and then she hung up without saying goodbye, which is how your mother has always ended conversations she does not want to have." Bea paused. She took a breath. Her voice softened, just a little, just enough. "I'm not asking you for gossip, Wren. I am asking you for a story."
"What story."
"The story of what happened here. The story of the woman who washed up on the north cove in July. The story that Sheriff Mercer will not talk about and that no one in this town will stop talking about, because this town has never in its entire salt-stained existence known how to stop talking about a thing that has scared it." Bea's hands went still on the towel. "You came back for your family. I understand that. But your family is also this town. And this town is sitting on a thing it does not know what to do with, and it has been waiting, I think, for someone who knows how to ask the right questions in the right order."
Wren looked at the pie. She did not touch it. The window beside the booth threw a rectangle of light onto the table, and the light moved as a cloud moved, and the diner, the whole diner, was quiet except for the radio and the small sounds of Bea's two customers stirring their coffee and talking low about the price of bait.
"You don't know what I'm working on," Wren said.
"I know you're working on something. I know your hair is too short and you slept in your clothes. I know your mother's voice on the phone had that particular quality she gets when she has been keeping something in a drawer for too long and someone has opened the drawer." Bea's mouth twitched. "I also know that I am a gossip, Wren, and that I am a good one, and that you are my oldest friend in this world, and that if you do not want me to print a word, I will not print a word. But I would like to print some words. The town is hungry for a story that is not about the cannery closing or the school board or the price of lobster. The town is hungry for a story with a shape. And you, my darling, have always known how to give a thing a shape."
Wren picked up her coffee. She drank. The coffee was good. The coffee was exactly how Bea had always made it, strong enough to stand a spoon in, with a half-teaspoon of something she had never named in it that made the bitterness smooth out at the end.
"And if I say no?"
"Then I will say no too, and the paper will run another recipe column and another letter from the man who thinks the town flag should be redesigned, and the town will keep its secrets and I will keep my mouth shut and we will both pretend we did not have this conversation." Bea smiled, a smaller smile now. "But you are not going to say no. Because you came back. And you do not come back here without a reason."
Wren set the mug down. She looked at Bea for a long moment. The bell above the door rang, and neither of them turned, and a man in a plaid coat came in and sat at the counter and ordered the usual and Bea did not move.
"I will think about it," Wren said.
"Good. Think about it here. Have the pie. It's on the house."
"Bea."
"Wren." Bea leaned back in the booth. The vinyl creaked. Her face was open and warm and had not changed at all, not really, and that was the thing about Bea, that she had always been exactly who she was, with no secret drawer in her that anyone had to open. "I want to say one more thing, and then I will let you eat your pie in peace."
"What."
"This town has long memories. Longer than I do, and I have a long one. Whatever you are looking for, whatever you came back here to find, somebody in this town already knows about it, and somebody in this town has been keeping it. And that somebody is going to notice you asking questions. And that somebody is going to decide, sooner or later, whether to help you or to stop you, and I would like you to think about which one of those you would prefer before you start." Bea paused. Her voice was still bright, still musical, but the music had shifted down a half step. "I say this as your friend. I say this as someone who has lived here her whole life. I say this as someone who has watched people come back to this town to open a box and end up with a box opened on them instead. Be careful what you ask. And be careful who you ask it of."
Wren nodded.
Bea stood, and the dish towel went over her shoulder, and the smile came back up to where it had been.
"Now eat your pie," she said. "And say hi to your mother for me, even if you don't mean it."
She went back behind the counter. The bell above the door rang, and this time Wren did turn, and a woman Wren did not know came in, and the morning was finally a morning, and the coffee was good, and the pie, when she finally tried it, was still the best apple pie in three counties, and her grandmother had been right about that, and she was not going to think about the photograph yet, or the letters, or the box, not yet, not until she had finished her pie and had another cup of coffee and figured out what Bea had meant by the woman who had washed up on the north cove in July, because that was not a thing she had known about, and Bea had known she had not known about it, and Bea had said it anyway, on purpose, and Wren was going to have to decide, before the morning was over, whether to call Sheriff Mercer or to drive out to the north cove herself and see what was left to see.
Wren left her truck parked in the gravel lot behind the town hall, beside a salt-stiffened pickup she recognized as belonging to the Harbormaster's widow, and walked around to the front entrance. The building was the same red brick it had been when she was a child, but the paint on the trim had weathered to a pale gray that almost matched the sky, and the flag over the door hung limp in the still air. She tried the front door and found it locked, then tried the side door off the parking lot, and that one opened with a groan of hinges that smelled of old iron and damp wool.
The clerk at the front desk was a young man she did not know, with a nameplate that read R. PELLETIER and a face that suggested he had been told, by someone, to be helpful to out-of-town visitors. He was less helpful when she told him she wanted to see the basement. He called someone. The someone was the Town Administrator, a woman named Patrice who had replaced Patrice's predecessor, who had replaced someone else, and after twenty minutes of polite shuffling, Wren was standing in a stairwell that smelled of mildew and old paper, descending toward a basement that held, according to the official ledger, the town archive, the evidence locker, and a walk-in cooler that had been pressed into service, decades ago, as the town's only morgue.
The cooler was off. The compressor had been dead for years, Patrice had explained on the way down, and they had not had the budget to repair or replace it. There was a new regional facility over in Ellsworth, and anything that came in now went straight there. But things had come in here, once. Things had been stored here. And when Patrice unlocked the heavy door with the round brass handle, and the smell came out, Wren understood at once that the smell was not going to leave her for a long time.
It was the smell of old cold storage and old preservation fluid and something under that which had once been a body and was now mostly the idea of a body, a residue, a faint mineral sweetness that caught at the back of the throat. The cooler was empty except for a metal gurney on casters, a wall of small labeled drawers, and three cardboard evidence boxes stacked on a wooden pallet. The boxes were unsealed. The flaps were folded back. There were tags tied to the handles with twine, the tags hand-lettered in blocky print.
PATELLA FRAGMENT, NORTH COVE, one read. JULY 2003.
Wren pulled her notebook out of her back pocket and uncapped her pen with her teeth.
She did not touch anything yet. She stood at the edge of the cooler and let her eyes adjust to the fluorescent flicker overhead, and she breathed through her mouth, and she looked. The boxes appeared to contain what she had come here hoping they would contain and dreading that they would contain: pieces of a body, separated by type, photographed in place, and then boxed and bagged and tagged and left, for twenty years, in the basement of a town hall that had never quite decided what to do with them.
She took notes. She described the light. She described the smell. She described the gurney, the casters, the small rust spots where the wheels met the axles. She noted the dates on the tags. She noted the absence of a tag for the skull, which should have been there if the body had been disarticulated, and was not, which meant either that the skull had never been recovered, or that it had been sent elsewhere, or that someone had taken it.
She was halfway through her third page of notes when she heard the stairwell door open behind her.
She did not turn at once. She finished the sentence she was writing. Then she capped her pen and turned, and Sheriff Dale Mercer was standing at the top of the cooler's three concrete steps, his hat in his hand, his face the particular gray of a man who had just learned that the thing he had been trying to prevent had happened anyway.
"Well," he said.
"Sheriff."
He came down the steps. His boots rang on the concrete. He stopped about four feet from her, which was farther than he used to stand from her, and she noticed that, too. He looked past her at the open boxes, and his jaw worked once, and she watched something move behind his eyes that she could not name.
"Who let you in here?" he said.
"Patrice."
"Patrice doesn't have the authority."
"I didn't ask for authority. I asked for the room."
He was quiet for a moment. He put his hat back on. He took it off again. He looked at her, and she saw that the gray in his face was not anger, exactly, though there was anger in it, somewhere deep. It was the look of a man watching a thing he had warned about come to pass.
"This was your daddy's favorite question," he said.
Wren did not move. "What was."
"Whose authority. Whose jurisdiction. Who said I could. He'd ask it three different ways in a single phone call, and half the time he already had the answer and he just wanted to see what you'd say."
"I'm not my father, Dale."
"No," he said. "You aren't."
He came one step closer. She could smell the woodsmoke on him, and the faint evergreen of the soap his wife had liked, which he still used, though his wife had been gone eleven years.
"Your father asked me about the cove woman," he said. "Back in oh-three. He came up here three weekends that summer. He asked if I had the file. I told him the case was open. He asked if I had the personal effects. I told him the personal effects were in evidence. He asked if I had the remains. I told him the remains were with the state medical examiner in Augusta."
"And were they?"
"No," Mercer said. "They were down here. They'd been down here since July. Your father never asked about this room specifically, or I'd have told him the truth, or I'd have lied to him outright, I don't know which, because I never thought of this room. Nobody thought of this room. It wasn't on the inventory. The state didn't know about it. The clerk before Patrice didn't know about it. I didn't know about it, until two weeks ago, when the new clerk did an audit."
Wren felt the air in the cooler change. She felt the weight of it shift.
"Two weeks ago," she said.
"I called your daddy's paper. I got rerouted to some desk in Portland. I left a message. I never heard back."
"My father is gone."
"I know he's gone, Wren."
The word was soft. The whole sentence was soft. She heard the gravel still, she heard the rural Maine still, but underneath it there was something that sounded almost like a man admitting a thing he had been holding in his chest for twenty years.
"I called Margot," she said. "I thought about calling Margot. I haven't yet."
He looked at her sharply. "Don't."
"I wasn't going to ask her about this."
"Don't ask her about any of it. Not the file. Not your father. Not the summers he spent up here. Not the calls. None of it. You can ask me. You can ask Bea, though Bea's going to give you a version. You can ask Patrice. You can ask the state police in Bangor, though you won't get anywhere. But do not call your mother about your father, because that is the one door that does not open well in this family, and you know it."
She let that sit. She did not argue with it. She thought of the photograph in the tin. She thought of the woman with the short hair and the unknown face.
"You told me about this room two weeks ago," she said. "And you didn't tell me when I came in the other day."
"I told you to leave it alone."
"You told me the file was thin."
"It's thin compared to what you'd think. It's not thin compared to what I have to lose if my office is seen as obstructing an open investigation."
She looked at him. "Is it being obstructed?"
"It has been. I'm fixing that. I made the call to the state yesterday. There's a medical examiner coming up from Augusta on Friday. I told them I had a box of remains that had been misfiled. They believe me. They don't know yet that a journalist got here first."
She closed her notebook. She slid it into her back pocket.
"I'm not writing about the boxes," she said. "Not today. Not until the medical examiner has seen them."
"And then?"
"And then I will decide what I write."
He was quiet again. He looked at her for a long time, and she thought she saw, at the edge of his expression, the smallest movement that might have been the beginning of relief, or the beginning of something like respect, which was harder, from him, and which she had not received, from him, since she was a girl.
"Your father did this, too," he said. "He came up quiet. He left quiet. He let me think he was gone and then he'd be on the phone at six in the morning asking me about tides and currents and how long a body will float in salt water in July. You do it quieter than he did. That's the only difference."
She nodded.
He turned and went up the steps. At the top he stopped with his hand on the door, and he did not look back, but he spoke.
"Don't go up to the cove alone," he said.
"Dale."
"Don't."
"The tide's out. There may still be something in the rocks."
"There may still be something in the rocks," he agreed. "And that's why I'm telling you not to go alone."
The door closed behind him. His boots went up the stairwell. The stairwell door opened and closed once more, and the basement settled into the sound of its own breath, and the flicker, and the smell.
Wren stood in the cooler for another minute. She did not open the evidence boxes. She made a small mark in the margin of her notebook, a single tick, the way she had marked things for twenty years that she intended to come back to. Then she went up the steps, through the mildew and the old paper, through Patrice's office with a nod and a thank you, into the gray daylight that smelled of salt and diesel and the faintest trace of woodsmoke from a stovepipe somewhere across the harbor.
She stood on the front steps of the town hall. She looked east, toward the cove. She looked south, toward her grandmother's house, and her mother's house, and the diner where Bea Tate would be wiping down the counter and watching the clock and waiting, with the patience of a woman who had kept secrets for forty years, to see which direction Wren Donnelly would walk next.